Tómas Arnar Þorláksson | Niðrí Bæ (Downtown) / 2022

spurned love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tómas Arnar Þorláksson (screenwriter and director) Niðrí Bæ (Downtown) / 2022 [35 minutes]

 

Icelandic director Tómas Arnar Þorláksson’s film Dowtown is one of the best short films I’ve seen in 2022. Although the plot is quite simple and somewhat predictable, the film’s beauty, pacing, and acting is excellent.

    The story involves three friends, Sigga (Natalía Gunnlaugsdóttir), Viktor (Baldur Einarsson), and Friðrik (Mikael Kaaber) who plan a wild night on the town, beginning with drinking even as they are being driven to the club where they plan to party. Viktor, an experienced drinker who has just returned to Reykjavík is already sick and vomiting, while Friðrik seems deep in thought. Meanwhile Sigga simply chatters keeping up a party like atmosphere and attempting to keep her two young male companions, evidently longtime friends, in two.

     Both seem to be heterosexual, Friðrik unable to stop talking about a girl he’s met during the summer while Viktor was away. Since the relationship ended badly, Sigga is sick and tired of Friðrik talking about it. Viktor snaps good-looking women along the way, as they get out and walk so that Viktor can also freely vomit along route.

    By the time they get into the club, Viktor is drunk that he hugs Friðrik, telling him that he loves him, and explaining that he will have to look after him feeling the way he does. Sigga, who appears to be experimenting with lesbianism jokes that it looks like her two hetero friends are going to make out in the club even before she can find a female friend.

     But Viktor soon has to the bathroom, while Friðrik goes to the bar to get Sigga and himself of couple of tequila shots. By the time he gets back to the table, however, everything has changed. We’ve watched Viktor come back downstairs, go outside and accidently discharge vomit over the club’s front window, the bouncer disallowing his return. And Sigga seems already to have met up with a female friend.

 

    Friðrik consumes the two tequila’s himself before going on search for his friend Viktor. But as he passes through the dance floor he runs into a girl who has been an old friend Stella (Sigurbjörg Nanna Karlsdóttir), who insists he dance. Since, through a door he spots the woman with whom he had had the summer affair, Bella (Kolbrún María Másdóttir), with another man he decides to dance with the other female acquittance in order to make her jealous.

     Stella is definitely a sex fiend, insisting that they go into the alley where she kisses him and wants to give him cocaine and a blow-job, all of which Friðrik resists, but she is near relentless.

      Even worse, she’s spotted by her current boyfriend, a ruffian, Tommi, who believes that Friðrik and his girlfriend are engaging in sex, and with his two buddies beats up the resistant boy, leaving him for dead.

     Sigga finally discovers him, brings him back to life and insists she’ll call her brother to drive him home. But, of course, Friðrik has still not discovered where Viktor has disappeared to and insists on going in further search. Sigga believes he’s gone off with the football friends to another party, and they head off in the direction where the party’s being held.

      On route, however, in a scene that does challenge our ability to believe in this plot, Friðrik is almost in hit by a car in which riding his summer girlfriend and her boyfriend. The couple stop and get out to see if he is all right, and Friðrik in total anger tells her off, explaining that he cannot get her out of his mind and wishes he could hate her for what he did to him, but continues to be unable to forget their affair. When Bella tells him that since their break up, she hasn’t thought about Friðrik at all, Sigga comes forward slugs the ex-girlfriend in the face, before running off, with Friðrik following soon after.

      If the film might seem by this time to have lost all credulity, it attempts to explain the odd behavior of everyone by mentioning that there is a full moon shining down on them. And as the movie hints, Reykjavík, despite its clubs and large music scene, is still a small city where nearly everyone knows one another.

      The couple on the run finally reach the other party, and Friðrik insists to Sigga that this time when he finds Viktor, he will finally speak with him, Sigga waiting outside seemingly knowing what information he wants to share with his best friend.

       One surely might have guessed by this time, that the girl friends, the drinking, and other drugs have all be a ruse on Friðrik’s part. When he finds Viktor, they meet up in the bathroom where he finally explains that while Viktor was away he had actually made the realization that he loves him, not just as a best friend, but as a gay man. Viktor retorts that he too loves Friðrik, but can’t return the kind of love his friend is seeking. It’s too bad because we would have made a good couple, he argues, but I just don’t have those kinds of feelings. 

      So Friðrik’s love is spurned once more, a beautifully sad song by composer (Kristján Sturla Bjarnason) playing as Sigga drives him back home, the camera focusing on actor Kaaber’s lovely face.

     

Los Angeles, March 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).